I was particularly moved by the poem “Swallow.” Some Christian paintings use swallows to symbolize saved souls. To sailors, a swallow represents approaching shore.  To me, the swallow personifies freedom from oppression.  The lines in the poem, arranged in a zig-zag pattern, mirror a bird flying, and reinforce the theme of freedom:

Fists of scrub shaking at the sand

                        of a waterless beach

                               wide as an ocean

                                       buckling its grainy folds

                                                into silken shadows

                        It’s only the odd insect rustling

                                    the air that she lives on

dreaming in shivering time-lapse

                of her nesting place…

Throughout the book, Lavorato plays with a variety of forms, giving readers an opportunity to be active as well as passive recipients of his words. We are never complacent and he is not predictable. “Janitor,” for example, written as a prose poem without punctuation, challenges the reader’s imagination:

            it’s not a great job he knows what with

            the meager pay and surface area

            of a gymnasium having to wax the

            floors run a dusting rag over and

            under the book boxes on the pews not…

His frank, unpretentious and clear language is accessible to all. Readers can open to any page and enjoy the flowing musical verses. His background as a composer is revealed in several of the poems, including “True Patriot Love”:

            A rhythm that is crude and earnest…

            and chords from the old country…

            as if they were tightening baffles

            of an accordion…

            And it is this song

            this song

            that is infinitely

            more

            beautiful

            than the one we know

His vivid description of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease in the poem “Vertigine: In Memory of Alfonso Lavorato” is so touching it reminded me of my own mother who died of dementia. The language jumps off the page. It is so evocative it is almost possible to hear the shrieks and the cries:

            Whenever they move him

            he screams

            body tensed…

            An efficient whirl of hands replaces diapers, new sheets,

            pull, tuck, continence pad, catheter insertion,

            swap glistening bag for empty one…

            Tracing his long path to the ground

            with a shriek that

            claws at the wind…